Cinema 1544: The As-Official-As-It-Gets Site

We have come up to the sixth Shelter-In-Place movie night, and Kevin decided to go with a Chris Marker film, but not the one you know.  Instead, it was the 1983 documentary Sans Soleil.

Sans Soleil is alternately described as a documentary and a travelogue, but in a lot of ways, it’s kind of like going to your mother-in-law’s home in 1985 and getting roped into watching a twelve carousels’ worth slide show of poorly-sorted vacation photos while she reads from a long-lost manuscript of letters written by Ernest Hemingway on the margins of paper ripped from Marcus Aurelius.  IfyouknowwhatImean.  Oddly enough, the film prominently features references to not one but at least two films that have been featured at Cinema 1544 – Vertigo and Stalker.  So that’s…interesting.

Since the film doesn’t really have a plot…at all…I’ll share some pictures and narration.  It’s the best I can do.

“I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember. We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst”

“He liked the fragility of those moments suspended in time. Those memories whose only function had been to leave behind nothing but memories. He wrote: I’ve been round the world several times and now only banality still interests me. On this trip I’ve tracked it with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter. At dawn we’ll be in Tokyo.”

“He used to write me from Africa. He contrasted African time to European time, and also to Asian time. He said that in the 19th century mankind had come to terms with space, and that the great question of the 20th was the coexistence of different concepts of time. By the way, did you know that there are emus in the Île de France?”

“As for the students, some massacred each other in the mountains in the name of revolutionary purity, while others had studied capitalism so thoroughly to fight it that they now provide it with its best executives.”

“All women have a built-in grain of indestructibility. And men’s task has always been to make them realize it as late as possible. African men are just as good at this task as others. But after a close look at African women I wouldn’t necessarily bet on the men.”

“Japanese horror movies have the cunning beauty of certain corpses.”

“The small bar in Shinjuku reminded him of that Indian flute whose sound can only be heard by whomever is playing it. He might have cried out if it was in a Godard film or a Shakespeare play, “Where should this music be?  Later he told me he had eaten at the restaurant in Nishi-nippori where Mr. Yamada practices the difficult art of ‘action cooking.’ He said that by watching carefully Mr. Yamada’s gestures and his way of mixing the ingredients one could meditate usefully on certain fundamental concepts common to painting, philosophy, and karate. He claimed that Mr. Yamada possessed in his humble way the essence of style, and consequently that it was up to him to use his invisible brush to write upon this first day in Tokyo the words ‘the end.’ ”

“Who said that time heals all wounds? It would be better to say that time heals everything – except wounds. With time, the hurt of separation loses its real limits. With time, the desired body will soon disappear, and if the desiring body has already ceased to exist for the other, then what remains is a wound, disembodied.”

Repeat for an hour and forty minutes.

I feel in some ways that this movie is like a Rorschach test.  I just don’t know what the right answer is.  Is the right answer, “Wow, this film is super profound!” and if you don’t think so, you’re a cretin?  Or is the right answer, “What the heck IS this nonsense?” and if you think it has deep meaning you’re a poseur?  I just don’t know.

All I know is that I may be a cretin, but I’m no poseur.  Which is to say, I just didn’t have the patience to make it all the way through this film without pulling out my laptop and beginning to futz around.  I’d have behaved better if this were an in-person movie night (oh, the memories!) but when the laptop was within reach and ain’t nobody else watching me do it, I was playing solitaire.  Sorry, Kevin!